LOTR Review - The Times

Off to see the wizards

BY BARBARA ELLEN

The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship
of the Ring

Hobbit forming

Peter Jacksons The Lord of the Rings:
The Fellowship of the Ring is the first part of a trilogy. That
means it ends with a To be continued feel, a bit like
those films which used to be cut in the middle by News at Ten.
Only this time theyre separated by a year at a time. Clever,
learned (OK, Ill come right out and say it, nerdish) people
applaud this move. It means that they will get further instalments
in 2002 and 2003 (theres nothing a nerd enjoys more than
being left dangling) and, more importantly, the film-makers didnt
have to splice out anything important just to squeeze this epic
yarn into a few hours.

So it is that you get Gandalf the wizard,
played by Ian McKellen, explaining the origins of the ring slowly,
grandly, beautifully, making sure we understand the storys
central message (that power corrupts) and why that is a Bad Thing.
He doesnt look at his watch, gibber at Frodo Baggins: Dodgy
ring, must destroy, save world  go, hobbit, go!, and
then have the action switch to a scrap between the fellowship
and the orcs on a mountain side, followed by the words, The End.
Theres no car chase to Mount Doom, just to save a bit of
time. And, of course, for this we must all be eternally grateful.

No one wants an overly condensed Lord of
the Rings  that would be a heresy, a bit like trying to
cut the birth scene from our own lives. That said, three three-hour
segments over as many years!  whatever happened to Instant
Gratification? Im not the most patient of women  show
me a cliffhanger and Im liable to stamp on the knuckles
of the plot thats hanging there, screaming: Give me
all the information now!

Consequently, the way The Lord of the Rings
has been arranged left this critic with a slightly cheated, episodic
feel. Even, astonishingly for such a major movie event, a television
feel. As if one has been watching some big expensive episode of
a long-running soap opera  Middle-earth EastEnders anybody?

Aside from all this carping, is the first
segment of the Rings trilogy a good movie, does it entertain,
move and invigorate? The answer has to be yes, if you dont
mind the fact that the characters dress in horrible medieval-lite
hessian-and-hemp fashions (Calvin Unclean? Yves St Abhorrent?),
and talk like a Clannad B-side. On occasions such as these, and
with Enya trilling away over her lutes on the soundtrack, you
really can feel like youve died and gone to Stonehenge.

There is also the small matter of female
input  which is just that, small, mainly confined to Liv
Tyler (elf princess Arwen) and Cate Blanchett (elf queen Galadriel)
wafting about in droopy dresses with trumpet sleeves, like some
under-attended Stevie Nicks convention. I suppose we have to blame
Tolkien for the fact that their parts are so minuscule that they
come across as side-lined fairy groupies. The Lord of the Rings
is, always has been, a guy thing, a story which splashes about
in themes of masculinity as subtly as a teenage Lothario splashes
on his Brut.

A good thing then that the story is so brilliantly
held and told at such a cracking pace. Usually odysseys in a fantasy
land are doomed to bore, the scary beings they encounter bound
to provoke sniggers and yawns.

However, here there is such a subtle moral
element that you do end up caring if the protagonists make it
through the sinister dwarf mine, if Frodo manages to sling on
his invisible cloak quickly enough to thwart his enemies, and,
crucially, sometimes his friends, and if it all could end happily
when theres a bunch of dodgy wizards and a character called
the Dark Lord of Mordor (who makes Darth Vader resemble a pussycat
with a toothache) to contend with.

Tolkien was said to have based the battle
scenes on his own experiences in the trenches of the First World
War. That sadness, that rage at the waste and cruelty, is perfectly
encapsulated too.

The Lord of the Rings is a dark and complex
work, considering the PG certificate (but there seem to be a lot
of hard ten-year-olds around these days). Moreover
there isnt a dud performance to be had. Blanchett and Tyler
might not have much to do, but they do it elegantly, with enough
fairy dust to keep things magical.

McKellen and Christopher Lee (as bad-egg
wizard Saruman) are magnificent. For my money, Lee gets the best
moment in the whole film  the bit where he watches Gandalf
escape in the talons of a giant hawk, and intones: And so-ooo,
you choose death. (Easily as fab, camp and quotable as Joaquin
Phoenixs You vex me line in Gladiator.) Elsewhere,
the human contingent of the fellowship, Sean Bean and Viggo Mortensen
as Boromir and Aragorn, are beautiful examples of old-fashioned
male morality, where valour and loyalty count for everything in
the mud and blood of the battlefield.

Above all, Ian Holm and Elijah Wood are
excellent as Bilbo and Frodo Baggins. Hairy-footed, dwarfish hobbits
they might be, but it is through their innocent, well-meaning
eyes that we get the truest glimpse of the rings evil. The
bit where Bilbo wrestles with himself to give up the ring has
an almost Othello-like intensity, as do the final scenes between
Bean and Mortensen. These are the really special moments in Lord
of the Rings.

The rest  the breathtaking battles,
digitally jiggled giant trolls, dwarf mines, the Disneyesque shires
of Bag End  proves that Jackson made good use of the available
technology and his native New Zealand locations, to help Lord
of the Rings to find its feet. However, its the performances
which give it its heart.

I just wish I felt better about all this
tbc business. Despite the comparisons with the Star
Wars trilogy, each of those stories seemed able to stand on its
own. It might have been better if Jackson had released the whole
thing as one long, bottom-numbing nine-hour epic. Now that would
have sorted your true Middle-earthers from your time-wasters.